An essay by Sean Goedecke titled "Blog about things you don't understand yet" hit 128 points on Hacker News this week, and it's some of the most useful writing advice I've seen in years. The premise sounds wrong — shouldn't you understand your topic before you write about it? — but the argument is both counterintuitive and deeply practical.
The Core Idea: Writing Is Thinking
Goedecke's central claim is that writing is the best way to think clearly about a topic. It's easy to believe you understand something when you're just turning it over in your head. When you have to condense it into words, you find out exactly how much you do or don't understand.
"I am constantly having moments where I type something, stop myself, and think 'wait, that can't actually be right', or 'is that really true?'"
This is the fundamental mechanism. Writing forces precision. Thinking is fluid and forgiving — you can gloss over gaps in your understanding because your mind fills them in automatically. Writing is rigid and unforgiving — every gap becomes a blank page or an awkward paragraph.
The Poetry Lesson: Structure Makes Writing Easier
Goedecke draws an unexpected parallel: writing poetry is easier than "writing what you feel" because the structure constrains your choices.
"The task of a poet is to repeatedly choose the next word. Writing to a structure (typically rhyme or meter) narrows that choice to a small set of words, instead of the entire English language. It's the same with blogging."
This is a profound insight. The hardest part of writing is not the writing itself — it's the infinite number of choices available to you at every moment. Structure reduces those choices. A sonnet has 14 lines with a specific rhyme scheme. A blog post that argues a specific point has a natural structure: claim, evidence, counterargument, conclusion.
The advice to "just write what you feel" is actually harder than writing to a constraint, because "what you feel" is an infinite space with no boundaries. Writing about a specific, potentially-controversial point narrows that space dramatically.
The Controversy Forcing Function
Goedecke's most practical advice is this: make sure everything you write is at least minimally controversial.
"If I write a draft that nobody sensible could disagree with, I scrap the draft. Making sure that everything I write is at least minimally controversial is a forcing function: it forces me to think about what the most interesting part of my position is, and it forces me to do enough research to defend it against the obvious criticisms."
This is the key to consistent blogging. If your posts are uncontroversial, you have nothing to say — and writing becomes a chore. If your posts take a position that someone might disagree with, you automatically have structure: here's what I believe, here's why, here's why the obvious objection doesn't hold.
The Learning Dividend
The most compelling part of Goedecke's approach is what happens during the writing process. He describes how, in post after post, he starts with one idea and ends up learning something completely different:
- Started thinking most AI prompts don't work → learned that newer OpenAI models lost o3's ability to geolocate
- Started thinking C2PA requires near-universal adoption → learned about PKI, managing private keys on local devices, and how C2PA actually works
- Started thinking the Luddite movement was decentralized → became fascinated by Luddite culture (far more elitist, misogynist, and violent than pop-Luddism describes)
"I could do this for every single post on the blog."
This is the learning dividend. By choosing to write about things you don't fully understand, you guarantee that the writing process will teach you something. And that something is often more interesting than what you originally planned to write about.
Changing Your Mind Mid-Post
Goedecke describes a practice that many writers would find terrifying: changing his mind while writing.
"There are posts where I began writing them with the opposite opinion to the one that eventually made it into the post. I think this is a good sign, and I hope I never stop doing it."
This is the ultimate test of intellectual honesty. If you write to learn, you must be willing to learn that you were wrong. Many writers start with a conclusion and cherry-pick evidence to support it. Goedecke starts with a hypothesis and follows the evidence wherever it leads — even if that means arriving at the opposite conclusion.
The First Paragraph Rewrite
One of Goedecke's practical tips is immediately actionable:
"By the time I write my way to the end of the post, I'm usually thinking so much more clearly about the topic that my conclusion paragraph is way better than my introduction. In fact, I've picked up the habit of going back and immediately rewriting the first paragraph as part of my first-draft process, because I know I'm going to end up doing it anyway."
This is a simple but powerful technique. Your introduction sets up the question; your conclusion answers it. But by the time you reach the conclusion, you understand the question better than when you started. The introduction written at the beginning and the introduction rewritten at the end will be qualitatively different — the latter will be sharper, more precise, and more compelling.
Why This Advice Works for Technical Writing
While Goedecke writes about technology topics, the advice generalizes to any field:
Choose topics you're curious about, not topics you've mastered. If you've mastered a topic, writing about it is just transcription. If you're curious about it, writing about it is exploration.
Take a position. Uncontroversial writing is boring. Even if you're wrong, a clearly stated position is more useful than a hedge.
Research as you write. Don't research first and write second — that's how you end up with a literature review, not an essay. Write first, hit the gaps in your knowledge, then research to fill them.
Embrace mind-changing. If the evidence changes your mind mid-post, follow it. Your readers will trust you more if you're honest about your intellectual journey.
Rewrite the introduction after you finish. You'll always understand the topic better at the end than at the beginning.
The Meta-Lesson
There's a beautiful recursion in this advice: this article is itself an example of the principle. I started writing it thinking I understood Goedecke's advice. By the time I finished, I realized the advice is more nuanced than I initially thought — the structure point (from poetry) is the real insight, not just "write about what you don't know."
If you want to blog consistently, write better, and learn faster, the best advice might be the scariest: write about things you don't understand yet. You'll learn more, your writing will be more interesting, and your readers will come along for the journey.
Based on "Blog about things you don't understand yet" by Sean Goedecke.
